Pull the side cover. Get up close and eyeball the CPU Fan to make sure it's not that. They can rattle, whine, and otherwise sound like the PC is coming apart, IF that's what it is.

On the other hand, if you can detect by both listening to the hard drive and sometimes placing your hand on it to check for heat or abnormal vibration, by all means and with dispatch, get that drive cloned or imaged over to another connected Secondary/Slave drive if it's getting ready to malfunction, becaue like's already been mentioned, it won't be long before it locks up for good, and you don't want all that data & programs locked into a device you can no longer access, thats for sure.

Hope it's just the fan though. I've replaced a few myself that sounded like the whole system was falling apart, replaced it, and all was normal again.

cheater87, SpeedFan 4.35 will give you lots of info about your different PC fans, without removing the covers. Here are some SpeedFan Screenshots. Unless you know what you are doing, I would not advise tweaking any of the settings.

Well, while your situation had a nice outcome, I had a harrowing experience here last night and the past week or so. I have a brand new PC, 2 months now, and a few weeks ago, my HD started making whining noises, pretty nasty at times too. It was doing it on and off, intermittent, but it didn't sound good, and it was getting slowly worse. Then came the BIOS warnings to backup and replace the HD yesterday. So I did that last night, took an image of the main partition and the restore partition with Clonezilla, just in time too. The heads were starting to hit the platter and Vista was running like molasses. LOL.... Anyway, got a replacement HD, slapped it in, restored the image, and all is well again. But had I not had that image and 2nd HD, it would have meant a lot more work reinstalling Vista from CD and getting drivers etc. Clonezilla saved my bacon...

cheater87,
Hopefully you have learned something from these posts. You are way past due in getting prepared for such an emergency. You need an image backup and you need it fast. Now is not the time to put it off any longer! You just had a near miss. You may not get any warning before it fails for real!

Hi cheater very wise decision,Also note you may find some helpful user guides like the one GroverH did in his sig for True Image you Should read and read and ask questions when In doubt when your ready to image and be sure to test it before disaster strikes.Do not wait until it does to find out if your image will work.You will need to test it image restore.I recently learned my self with paragon I made a bootable disk and restore from external with success but it was back to my original not a new one HDD Dam If I learned and still learning any one can do it. Best of luck to ya

I went over to a neighbor's house and he blew an air duster into the fan area after dismantling it. Its going great so far.

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I hope this 'dismantling' doesn't mean you took the hard drive apart...

That's not good at all to do...

If it was making a sound it never made before, then the drive is probably going bad. All hard drives I buy, when I get them, I get use to the sound they make, so that if later they make any odd sounds that I never noticed when it was new can be chalked to a possible problem.

So get your EAR down there next time and get use to the sound of a good drive, so when it starts making FUNKY sounds you'll know it's time to ditch it...

I hope this 'dismantling' doesn't mean you took the hard drive apart...

That's not good at all to do...

If it was making a sound it never made before, then the drive is probably going bad. All hard drives I buy, when I get them, I get use to the sound they make, so that if later they make any odd sounds that I never noticed when it was new can be chalked to a possible problem.

So get your EAR down there next time and get use to the sound of a good drive, so when it starts making FUNKY sounds you'll know it's time to ditch it...

I'm going to get an external HDD from amazon and need help learning how to use clonezilla.

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Clonezilla was just an example of something that has worked well for me, but honestly, I can't say that it has the best or easiest interface for an inexperienced user. You may want to check out some other alternatives, and many of the paid apps are excellent and quite a bit easier to use. Just trying to give you an honest heads up on it. Some people find it non-intuitive and somewhat difficult to use and figure out.